The Soul Hunter (13 page)

Back to the Parkland website. Of the ninety ob-gyns listed, fifteen were women. I clicked on each name, one by one. A brief bio and vita of each woman appeared, including photographs. I went back to the article for details. The victim had been thirty-four at
the time of the assault. That would make her forty now.

I went back to the vitae and checked medical school graduation dates. Taking into account age, and whether or not the physician was working at Parkland at the time, only one name matched. I clicked on her name and saw a smiling photo of a striking Hispanic woman. Her name was Maria Chavez.

Dr. Chavez was an assistant professor on the teaching faculty of Parkland Hospital. She’d done her undergraduate work at the University of Texas at El Paso, majoring in Spanish, graduating with a B.A., then completed a second undergraduate degree in pre-med at the University of Texas in Austin. B.S. in biology. Ambitious girl. And smart. She’d gone to UT Southwestern Medical School and done her residency at Parkland.

A knock on the door scared me almost out of my chair. A student intern stuck her head in the door.

“Sorry to bother you, Dr. Foster. Your eleven o’clock is waiting.”

I checked my watch. It was ten after eleven. I was going to have to improve my time management skills.

“Tell him I’ll be right there.”

I finished scribbling some notes and closed the computer files.

I floated through the rest of my day in a haze, anchoring for fifty minutes at a time during sessions. Somehow I was able to focus on my patients, which was probably the Holy Ghost intervening on their parts, not mine.

I ate lunch at my desk and got caught up on paperwork and phone calls. I called Randy’s Right-Now Rodent Removal and scheduled a visit for tomorrow morning. And then I spent some time trying to track down Maria Chavez.

Getting in touch with a physician is even harder than trying to reach a psychologist. They’re always in surgery or at the clinic, or in meetings, or with patients, and each time you call a different location, you have to leave a message with some nurse or assistant who thinks you’re a patient and starts the conversation
with “Date of Birth?” I knew this, of course. My dad is a surgeon. But still it frustrated me, and by the end of the hour, I’d finished about a third of my tuna sandwich and lost another third or so of my sanctification.

By the end of the day, I was shot out, bled dry and globally pessimistic. I went for a long swim, in the indoor pool this time (I may be foolish but I’m not a complete moron), and tried unsuccessfully to clear my head.

By the time I got home, I was starving. And agitated.

I threw my keys and cell phone onto the kitchen table and checked my answering machine. McKnight and Jackson had both called to check on me. My father had called. He sounded angry and demanded an immediate call back. And my brother Guthrie had called. He’d just gotten the news about Dad and Kellee’s pending progeny. Which explained the phone call from my dad. I was about to be assigned to settle Guthrie down, I suspected.

I ignored the messages and turned on the stereo. Axl Rose had gone out with the day’s garbage. I popped in a Dave Brubeck CD and felt my spine decompress as he tapped his little black and white keys.

The mail had come, along with a brown package, sitting on my front step.

Given recent events, I found unexpected mail a little bone-chilling.

The package had no return address, just one of those UPS bar-code labels. It was in a plain brown box, neatly taped. I picked the package up and returned to the kitchen. I leaned in and listened for ticking.

Then I realized how paranoid I was being and took a pair of scissors to the tape and opened it.

Inside was another box, along with a note, written in purple crayon. “Happy Birthday, Dylan.” Purple hearts were drawn on the margins of the note. I felt my spine tighten back up.

I went to the bathroom and got some tweezers, then picked up the note and set it aside. I was too curious and too anxious to wait for the police to come. I put on a new pair of Playtex rubber gloves (“sassy new color!” the package shouted), and with shaking hands, opened the second box.

Inside was a bright pink Barbie lunchbox.

I used a dishtowel to pick it up and examine it. Maybe there was something inside. I sniffed it. A body part? I shook it. It felt empty.

Pulling open the zipper, I peeked inside and saw another note, folded. I used my tweezers to pick up the note and spread it out on the table.

My fear quickly morphed into delight.

The package wasn’t from Gordon Pryne at all. It was from my favorite five-year-old in the world, Christine Zocci, the niece of the student who had died last year. She had obviously picked out the gift herself. And drawn the card. Purple is her favorite color.

The note was from her mother, Liz. A chatty tome about their family, catching me up on everyone. Liz and Andy were doing great. Andy was running the family business now, and Liz was administering the family charities, which meant she was in charge of an enormous amount of money. Christine was in her second semester of kindergarten and had decided she wanted to be a queen when she grew up. When Liz explained that America doesn’t have a queen, Christine had said, “Then I’ll have to be queen somewhere else.”

Her two younger brothers, “the little hoodlums” as the family referred to them, had recently gotten themselves kicked out of play group for biting the other children. Mikey, the older one, had decided to cut his own hair before school one day, and now sported a jagged bald spot where his bangs used to be.

I love this family.

The lunchbox had a picture of a red-haired Barbie, a thoughtful
choice since my hair is auburn. She was wearing a sporty, striped sweater and pink pants. It had a shoulder strap and came with its own hot-pink Barbie sippy cup.

I picked up the phone and called the Zocci house in Chicago, knowing Andy wouldn’t be home from work yet and that Liz would be wrangling kids and making grilled cheese sandwiches.

Christine answered the phone.

“Hi, Punkin, it’s Miss Dylan,” I said.

“Mommy!” Christine shouted. “It’s Miss Dylan!” then said to me, “Did you get your present?”

We chatted about the various features of my new lunchbox and Christine told me about the boy at school she liked, and wondered if I still liked the same boy. I said yes, and thought about how little changes in the heart of a girl from age five to thirty-five. I guess we all want to be queen someday, at least in the eyes of the right boy.

Christine dropped the phone and Liz picked it up, shouting at the boys to get the goldfish out of the toilet. I wondered if it was a real goldfish or the Pepperidge Farm kind.

“Never have children,” Liz said. “Save yourself while you still can.”

Conversations with Liz always involve shouted instructions to the children, in mid-sentence, so that I have to concentrate on what she means when she says, “Andy and I went to a charity event right now Tommy get your brother off the kitchen table at the Four Seasons and saw Christine hand me the glass and I’ll get you some milk.”

But somehow their family life always grounds me. If I could, I’d live with them, just to know what it feels like to have that much chaos and unaffected goodwill swirling around me. I’m convinced I’d repair some of my fractured mental health in such an environment.

I felt better by the time I got off the phone—downright
loved, in fact, instead of my usual lost state of abject loneliness and vulnerability.

My cell phone rang then. I didn’t recognize the number.

“Dylan Foster,” I said.

“Dr. Foster, this is Maria Chavez. I had a message to call you.”

“Dr. Chavez, thanks so much for calling me back.”

“What can I do for you, Dr. Foster? Do we have a mutual patient?”

“Actually, no,” I said, feeling suddenly awkward. “It’s a personal matter.” I took a breath. There was no good way to say it. “Involving Gordon Pryne.”

She didn’t respond. I thought maybe she’d hung up.

“Dr. Chavez?”

“Yes,” she said.

“I’m sorry to intrude.”

“How do you know Gordon Pryne?”

“I don’t. Not personally.”

“Dr. Foster, what is this about?”

“Gordon Pryne is a suspect in a murder.”

“Drew Sturdivant,” she said. “The police have already talked to me. Are you with the police department? Or was she a patient of yours?”

“Neither. I teach at SMU.”

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“Drew Sturdivant was murdered with an ax. The ax that was used to kill her was left on my front porch the night she died.”

“I see,” she said slowly. “Do you know him?”

“No. And I don’t know why he picked me.”

“It’s not the sort of question you always get an answer to,” she said, her voice softening.

“Could we meet to talk?”

“I’m on my way home. The sitter leaves at seven. Why don’t you just meet me there?”

“Are you sure?”

“I’d like to get this over with,” she said. “No offense.”

“None taken.”

She gave me the address. We lived in the same neighborhood.

We agreed to meet at seven thirty, which was forty-five minutes from now.

I wasn’t sure why I wanted so badly to talk to her. But something was tugging at me. I knew she was an important link.

I made myself a quick supper and got dressed to meet Maria Chavez.

M
aria Chavez lived in a duplex in my funky little neighborhood, not four blocks from my house. Her yard was winter brown and her Christmas lights were still strung on her porch, a luminous little greeting committee. The flower beds on her half of the yard were neatly mulched and held climbing rosebushes, all trimmed and trussed for the winter. The beds on the other side were empty, tufts of Bermuda grass growing in the snaggle-toothed sneer of crooked liner rocks.

I stepped around a red tricycle and knocked on the door.

She answered quickly. She was a tiny woman, almost child size. And beautiful, even in her hospital scrubs, her brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, her face free of makeup, her eyes tired. She shook my hand and invited me in.

The house was pleasant, decorated in warm browns and reds. There was a stack of books by the couch and a magazine open on the dining room table beside an empty plate. Under the dining room table was a little array of toys. A dump truck, a rubber snake, and three plastic dinosaurs.

“Can I offer you anything?” she asked. “I was just about to have a glass of wine.”

“No thanks,” I said.

I took the opportunity to spy a little while she was in the kitchen. My initial glance around the room had suggested that Dr.
Chavez was a tidy woman and, like me, a tad bit obsessive. The room had a comfortable, lived-in feel without seeming cluttered or chaotic at all. I didn’t know how old her kid was, but he was either old enough to corral his own toys or someone did a heroic job of wrangling the kid-gear so that it didn’t take over the house.

I didn’t see a television anywhere. She was atypical in that sense. I don’t have one either, and know very few other abstainers. She did have a good stereo, though. I thought I recognized the piano music that was playing softly as Chopin, but I wasn’t sure.

I’ve always thought you could learn a lot about people by studying their bookshelves, so I walked over to Maria Chavez’s bookcase and indulged my nosiness. Stuck between
Gray’s Anatomy
and a two-year-old
Physician’s Desk Reference
was a copy of
Horton Hears a Who
. Other children’s books, some in English, some in Spanish, were poking out from the cracks between the grown-up books.

She owned several Spanish textbooks, as well as a formidable collection of fiction written in both English and Spanish; some authors I recognized and some I didn’t. She leaned toward weighty fiction. No suspense novels or anything like that. Many of the authors had Hispanic surnames. There was some poetry, several books on Cuba, and five or six books, in the top right-hand corner, on criminal psychology. I recognized several authors and titles. Most of the books were about the etiology of criminal behavior. Nature vs. nurture.

I made it back to my spot by the door before she returned. She gestured for me to sit on the couch. She sat in the chair opposite me, her feet together, her elbows on her knees, and her wine glass in both hands in front of her. She kept her head down for a minute, almost like she was praying. Or trying to gather herself. I waited until she looked up at me.

“Thanks for seeing me,” I said. “And so quickly. I know this must be hard for you.”

“What can I do for you, Dr. Foster?”

“Please call me Dylan.”

She nodded and waited for me to answer her question.

“I’m not exactly sure,” I admitted. “I’m trying to put a puzzle together, only I don’t know what the picture is supposed to look like. And I don’t know how the pieces are shaped. Or even where the edges are.”

“And Gordon Pryne is one of the pieces,” she said.

“I think so.”

“And you think my story might fit in as well?”

“I do.”